View full sizeHomeowner Wade Frey of Chalmette, Louisiana spent a week on his roof after Hurricane Katrina and took this photo. The town of Chalmette is considered part of the basin which Stanwood Judge Duval ruled was flooded during Katrina due to the Corps of Engineers shoddy maintenance of a nearby navigation channel known as the MRGO.

View full sizeHomeowner Wade Frey of Chalmette, Louisiana spent a week on his roof after Hurricane Katrina and took this photo. The town of Chalmette is considered part of the basin which Stanwood Judge Duval ruled was flooded during Katrina due to the Corps of Engineers shoddy maintenance of a nearby navigation channel known as the MRGO.

We wanted to know Mr. Joe Bruno's take on a recent appeals panel's reversal of its own ruling in March of this year that determined the Army Corps can be sued for its negligent maintenance of a shipping channel near New Orleans.

Mr. Bruno is the lead prosecutor for the flood survivors during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The panel now says the Corps, though already found guilty of negligent maintenance of the now closed MR-GO shipping channel, cannot be held financially liable.

"This ruling is obscenely obnoxious, said Mr. Bruno in a phone interview. "It's as though the panel said in March that a red light is red, and supplied an abundance of reasons and precedents that the red light is red. But now, the panel says the red light is green, and says it in just one and a half pages. This is politics, not law."

Before signing off, Mr. Bruno recommended that anyone interested in the strange case of the appeals court about-face should read what he believed to be an excellent one-page analysis by environmental law expert Robert Verchick.

Robert Verchick is a Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar at Loyola University, recent winner of a Fulbright, and author of Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard University Press, 2010).